The chain rule allows you to differentiate composite functions (functions of other functions) ie) f(g(x)) such as sin(3x²) or (5x³+2x+3)². The rule is as follows

or to understand it more simply you differentiate the inner function and multiply it by the derivative of the outer function (leaving what’s inside alone).

Differentiating brackets raised to a power

The chain rule can be a great short cut to differentiating brackets raised to a power as it doesn’t require you to multiply them all out, it also enables you to differentiate brackets raised to an unknown power.
Consider
This is the composite of the functions ax+b and tⁿ. So we differentiate them both to get a and nt^n-1 and then apply the formula to get

Notice how we multiplied the derivative of the inner function, a, by the derivative of the outer function nt^n-1 but substituted ax+b back in for t.

To generalise we can replace the ax+b with f(x) and by applying the above get

Differentiating Trigonometric functions

We can also use the chain rule when differentiating sin(f(x)) and cos(f(x)) since we know how to differentiate sin(x) and cos(x).
Using the chain rule we get

and